American Musicological Society Southern Chapter

Annual Meeting

19–20 February 2016

Palm Beach Atlantic UniversitySchool of Music and Fine ArtsHelen K. Persson Recital Hall

West Palm Beach, Florida

PROGRAM

FRIDAY, 19 February 2016

8:00–8:45 a.m. Registration and Breakfast

8:45–8:55 Opening remarks: Dr. Lloyd Mims Dean of the School of Music and Fine Arts, Palm Beach Atlantic University

9:00–10:30 Session 1: Re-Examining Historical NarrativesJoseph Sargent (University of Montevallo), chair

Leoncavallo’s “Appunti” and the History of Pagliacci Andreas Giger, Louisiana State University

Constructing a Narrative: Reexamining Theodor Adorno’s Alban Berg:

Master of the Smallest Link through Source StudyMorgan Rich, University of Florida

The Doxastarion of Markos Domestikos Notated in the New Analytical Method:

A Critical Analysis of a Musical LegacyChristina Filis, Palm Beach Atlantic University

10:30–10:50 Break

10:50–12:20 Session 2: The Musical Body: Sound, Gender, and FaithSarah Eyerly (Florida State University), chair

“The Beauty of Israel Is Slain”: William Billings’s Anthem for the Reinterment of Dr. Joseph Warren

Charles Brewer, Florida State University

Embodying Faith and Fandom: Songs of Identity in Depression-Era Gospel Singing Communities C. Megan MacDonald, Florida State University

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Whistling’s Sonic Ambiguity and Its Impact on the Whistler’s Body

Maribeth Clark, New College of Florida

12:20–2:00 Lunch

2:00–3:00 Session 3: Gender and Politics on Stage and ScreenJamie Younkin (Florida Institute of Technology), chair

“Ain’t I Always Been a Good Husband?”: Male Characters as Keys to Portraying the

Wayward Woman in Street SceneMcKenna Milici, Florida State University

Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music: Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977)

Maria Cizmic, University of South Florida

3:00–3:20 Break

3:20–4:20 Session 4: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Long Nineteenth CenturyAndreas Giger (Louisiana State University), chair

Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a Prototype for the Romantic German Tragedy

Navid Bargrizan, University of Florida

Guilty until Proven Innocent: Thomas Davis and the Struggles of Irish Art Music

Timothy Love, Louisiana State University

4:25–5:10 Business Meeting

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SATURDAY, 20 February 2016

8:30–9:00 a.m. Registration and Breakfast

9:00–10:00 Session 5: Music Creation and Music EducationMichael O’Connor (Palm Beach Atlantic University), chair

“Going to School and Winning the Olympics”: A Musicological Examination of Childsongs at a

Tallahassee Community CenterCarrie Danielson, Florida State University

Sousa’s Band Arrangements of Orchestral Works and/as Public Education

Bryan Proksch, Lamar University

10:00–10:20 Break

10:20–11:50 Session 6: Conclusions Michael Broyles (Florida State University), chair

Out of the Back Row: Ferdinand Hiller’s Views on Composing Applied to His String Quartets

Douglass Seaton, Florida State University

Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics and the Concept of Two-Dimensional Music DongJin Shin, University of Florida

John Adams and the Avant-Garde, 1971–72Michael Palmese, Louisiana State University

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ABSTRACTS

FRIDAY, 19 February

Session 1: Re-Examining Historical NarrativesJoseph Sargent (University of Montevallo), chair

Leoncavallo’s “Appunti” and the History of Pagliacci Andreas Giger (Louisiana State University)

In 1943 Allied bombs destroyed the archives of Leoncavallo’s publisher (Sonzogno) and the theater where Pagliacci was first performed (the Teatro Dal Verme). In light of the resulting scarcity of sources pertaining to the opera’s compositional history, scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Leoncavallo’s autobiographical “Appunti,” without sufficiently verifying the information they contain. Sources such as notifications in the press, eyewitness accounts, and Leoncavallo’s unpublished correspondence with Sonzogno, however, point to a history of Pagliacci that substantially differs from the one told in the “Appunti.”

The primary sources contradict Leoncavallo’s stories of having auditioned for Sonzogno with only the libretto and of having based the plot on a crime of passion he remembered from his youth. Regarding the latter, Leoncavallo was twice charged with having imitated an existing play, first Manuel Tamayo y Baus’s Un drama nuevo (1867), then Catulle Mendès’s La femme de Tabarin (1874). Leoncavallo denied having known either work. In defense against the charge, he embellished in his “Appunti” the crime of passion from his youth with details taken from the libretto of Pagliacci. Scholarship has never asked whether Leoncavallo knew Un drama nuevo at the time he wrote the libretto or, if he did, in what version. Although he probably did not know the play at the time, he may have included elements unique to Ermete Novelli’s adaptation—then performed in Italy as Un dramma nuovo—in a crucial later addition to the opera, the “Prologue.”

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When Leoncavallo auditioned for Sonzogno, he played for him an opera he (1) considered to be complete without “Prologue” (the ostensible “veristic manifesto”) and (2) would tie to a “real” event only after having been accused of imitating existing plays. With two strong veristic arguments put in perspective, Pagliacci’s relationship to verismo will have to be corrected even further than has recently been suggested.

Constructing a Narrative:Reexamining Theodor Adorno’s Alban Berg:

Master of the Smallest Link through Source StudyMorgan Rich, University of Florida

In his 1968 monograph, Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Adorno posits a revolutionary understanding of Berg’s idiosyncratic musical language, portraying Berg as a composer able to construct the grand totality of a piece from an atomistic detail. Yet this monograph is often misunderstood because of its seemingly nostalgic view of the composer, considered to be a vehicle for the late Adorno to reflect fondly upon his teacher. Because of its highly personal narrative, Adorno is criticized for lacking detailed analysis and ignoring many elements of Berg’s musical language. To be sure, as a culmination of his life’s work on Berg, the monograph was a calculated combination of essays and analyses intended to form a narrative of Berg’s character and his music. The background ideas for this work originate from several of Adorno’s previous essays on Berg: from “Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck” (1925) to “Bergs kompositionstechnische Funde” (1963).

Based on previously unexamined manuscripts by Adorno, housed in both the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv as well as the Alban Berg Archiv at the Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek Musik Sammlung, I demonstrate that this monograph was planned as early as 1936, but underwent periodic changes, being constantly reshaped until its publication in 1968. Even Adorno played a part in the misconceptions of this book,

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stating in the preface that its genesis was the result of a request from the publisher Elisabeth Lafite in the late 1960s. He also states, perhaps purposely misleading, that while a few materials were adapted from analytical essays published in a 1937 volume on Berg edited by Willi Reich, most of the materials were newly written in 1968.

As I argue in this paper, from the moment he met Berg in 1925, Adorno systematically constructed a dialectic narrative of Alban Berg and his music, resulting in Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs. For the first time I offer a detailed look at the archival materials, whose documents range from handwritten drafts from 1936 to multiple typed drafts and pre-publication exemplars from the 1950s through 1968. The ideas he kept from 1936 to the edits he made in consecutive drafts illustrate the process under which Adorno crafted his narrative.

The Doxastarion of Markos Domestikos Notated in the New Analytical Method:

A Critical Analysis of a Musical LegacyChristina Filis, Palm Beach Atlantic University

The New Analytical Method that is attributed to the famous “Three Teachers” of the Eastern Orthodox Church, came from an effort to simplify and standardize the neumatic-style of Old Byzantine chant notation, into a more precise type of notation that would help to preserve melodies. This reformation of notation was adopted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1814 and is credited to Chrysanthos Madytos (1770-1846), Gregorios Protopsaltis (d. 1821) and Chourmouzios Chartophylax (d. 1840). One of their primary goals of their efforts was to transcribe the works of Petros Lambadarios (d. 1778) for the first time in the New Analytical Method, in particular his Doxastarion.

A Doxastarion is a music book that contains Glorias for specific festal periods and saints, as well as chant for the Great Hours of the liturgy. Gregorios and Chourmouzios each

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created editions that were transcriptions of Petros’ Doxastarion. These editions would become standard repertoire for singers in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Gregorios and Chourmouzios studied under the same teacher, Iakovos Protopsaltis (d. 1800), who had an additional student, Manuel Protopsaltis (d. 1819). Manuel’s student, Markos Domestikos, also created a transcription of the Doxastarion according to the New Analytical Method, where he claims to have made corrections to Gregorios’ version directed by his teacher. That claim, investigated here, is particularly important for Byzantine musicology, especially due to the significance of Gregorios’ contribution to the Church. Based upon a thorough investigation and comparative analysis of the Doxastaria of Gregorios Protopsaltis (1821), Chourmouzios Chartophylax (1820) and Markos Domestikos (1831), I show inconsistencies in Markos’ claim and stylistic differences between the Doxastaria that prove that no critical edition of the earlier chant existed in transcription in the New Analytical Method.

Session 2: The Musical Body: Sound, Gender, and FaithSarah Eyerly (Florida State University), chair

“The Beauty of Israel Is Slain”: William Billings’s Anthem for the Reinterment of Dr. Joseph Warren

Charles Brewer, Florida State University

In eighteenth century New England, funerals were generally private affairs and even a parishioner’s passing may have only been noted on the following Sunday. Since there was little need, most composers included only a single funeral anthem in their collections; William Billings, however, composed six. One of these is well documented: Billings’s “Samuel the Priest” was performed at the funeral of Rev. Samuel Cooper on 2 January 1784. The original purpose for his other extensive funeral anthem, “The Beauty of Israel is Slain,” is not specified either in its first publication or external documents. While Billings’s short and generic “Funeral

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Anthem” is based on a text commonly used for funeral sermons, “The Beauty of Israel” sets a passage from 2 Samuel 1 that was used rarely, and then only for the funerals of those due “civill respects or deferences.”

There is one figure in revolutionary Boston whose memorial service may have merited elaborate music. Based on contemporary documents, music formed part of the elaborate Masonic service for the reinternment of Dr. Joseph Warren on 8 April 1776, who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. The service was planned by the Saint Andrew’s Lodge, whose members (including Paul Revere and Josiah Flagg, and later, in 1778, Billings) were “desirous of taking up the deceased’s remains, and, in the usual funeral solemnities of that society, to decently inter the same.” As noted in the pamphlet Jachin and Boaz (1762), a Masonic burial service would have been conducted “with the choristers on each side, and the mourners at the foot, the service is rehearsed, an anthem sung.” Since the service in Boston took place in King’s Chapel, and included an elaborate oration by Perez Morton, it is likely that Billings’s anthem on the text traditionally applied to heros would have been especially appropriate on this day. By 1800, “The Beauty of Israel is Slain” was even reappropriated for a commemoration of George Washington.

Embodying Faith and Fandom: Songs of Identity in Depression-Era Gospel Singing Communities C. Megan MacDonald, Florida State University

During the Great Depression, a time marked by migration and unemployment, the southern gospel industry flourished. Publishers produced records, hosted singing schools, sent quartets to perform at conventions, and sold millions of songbooks each year. Beyond a commercial popular music, the songbooks bound together faith-based singing communities where participants could reconcile shifting identities of gender, race, and regionalism in song. Publishers produced consumable products—songbooks and recordings—

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but the industry thrived due to creations of fan culture, such as submissions of songs and poetry to songbooks and fan newsletters.

This paper argues that these products of fan culture reveal performances of shifting intersectional identities that transformed into shared experiences through the individual and the communal embodiment of song. When the books were released every six months, singers quickly learned the four-part harmonies and the lyrics echoed from homes and churches to conventions and concerts. Often songs like “I’ll Fly Away” emerged from the intended ephemerality of the books to preserve lasting impressions of the South and the Great Depression. Songwriters addressed complex theological and cultural constructions of identity—affected by migration, labor, motherhood, and whiteness—in musical arrangements. These arrangements were then breathed into sound by the community as a whole. While the publishers produced the books, they were merely conduits and gatekeepers for these embodied expressions of faith. This research expands on the recent studies of southern gospel publishers by Goff, Shearon, and Harrison to include voices of the community through critical examination of song lyrics, songbook covers, interviews, and gospel newsletters housed at archives at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Emory University, the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, and the Library of Congress. These materials provide a vantage point to better understand how the embodiment of individual and communal song creates meaning and articulates identity in faith-based communities.

Whistling’s Sonic Ambiguity and Its Impact on the Whistler’s Body

Maribeth Clark, New College of Florida

This paper examines the powerful and vague sound of human whistling, constructing a theoretical frame for consideration of the activity as a commonplace musical act in the United States. Whistling’s ambiguity lies in its loose association with

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the sounding body. Rather than emphasizing the body’s presence, as does the “grain” of the singing voice (Barthes), The flutelike tone lacks markers that connect it with a body. Its lack of a creator’s stamp or brand invites speculation and meaning-making. This status of the sound as anonymous and open makes it flexible. It can be interpreted as a voice, as a signal, as an ingredient of language, as music. Being a powerful sound, it was often prohibited, and the people who could whistle—either well or poorly—were often silenced. Sailors do not whistle in order to prevent raising gale winds. Russians do not whistle indoors because it is bad luck. Women in the US who whistle, like crowing hens, always come to some bad end. Men should not whistle because it is an activity for boys.

Taking this ambiguity of the sound into account, this paper considers the reception of whistling in short stories and articles found in nineteenth-century American newspapers, novels (Little Women and Rose of Dutcher’s County), and the popular press. It looks at fictional whistlers (Jo, Little Women; Rose, The Rose of Dutcher County) and their professional real-world counterparts, such as the white, middle-class divorcée Alice J. Shaw and the freed slave George Washington Johnson. One sees many discussions of gender framed through discussions of whistling. Discussions of whistling and whistlers, I argue, seemed to serve as an aural ink blot, revealing attitudes about gendered bodies and their appropriate expression through sound. The ambiguity of whistling contributed to its power to shape the perception of a whistler’s gender, a power over which the producer of the whistle had little control.

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Session 3: Gender and Politics on Stage and ScreenJamie Younkin (Florida Institute of Technology), chair

“Ain’t I Always Been a Good Husband?”: Male Characters as Keys to Portraying the

Wayward Woman in Street SceneMcKenna Milici, Florida State University

When Kurt Weill wrote Street Scene (1947), based on Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, he endeavored to create a new American operatic idiom crafted for the Broadway stage. Because much of Weill’s writings on this Broadway opera focuses on the topic of genre, scholarship on Street Scene has largely engaged the work on Weill’s own terms, investigating whether his attempt to synthesize musical theater and opera was successful or not. Street Scene is also remarkable in the way it highlights the female experience in mid-century America, as its characters exemplify a nuanced conception of male and female roles, resulting in a commentary on conventional gender dynamics. The show centers on Mrs. Maurrant, a mother of two and known adulterer, and reviews of the original production indicate the ambiguity in how this character was perceived. In addition to the portrayal of Mrs. Maurrant through her own music and text, we come to understand the confines of her situation through the character development of the two men that frame her: her husband and her lover. This paper explores how the audience’s relationship with Mrs. Maurrant is shaped by the musical portrayal of these two men. A close reading of the choices Weill made for these male characters reveals how their musical characterization affects the reception of Mrs. Maurrant, a perspective not available to audiences of Rice’s original play. Investigating Weill’s notes and sketches in Street Scene’s archival materials also uncovers other depictions Weill explored in representing these characters. At a time when society extolled women as guardians of the family unit and its accompanying domestic space, Street Scene offers a sympathetic portrayal of a character that failed to fit this role.

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Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music: Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977)

Maria Cizmic, University of South Florida

Larisa Shepitko’s 1977 film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) had a large impact on late socialist culture with its tale of surviving both natural and human elements during WWII. Drawing on Dominick LaCapra’s and Carolyn Dean’s work on empathy, this essay will consider how Alfred Schnittke’s film score for The Ascent shapes an audience’s empathetic response to the physical, emotional, psychological, and ethical travails of two Soviet partisans, the film’s central characters. The Ascent brings together several themes that were important to late socialist culture: a persistent fascination with the Great Patriotic War, a concern for historical memory in general, and a focus on morally complex issues, particularly loyalty and betrayal. At critical moments in the film’s narrative, Schnittke’s music lends insight into each soldier’s internal experience of war and thereby constructs an audience’s sense of empathy for both soldiers. What can such an experience of film-music empathy tell us about the meanings ascribed to the past and the relevance of moral issues during late socialist culture?

The Ascent follows two Russian partisan soldiers as they leave their camp to find food and quickly get lost in the snowy landscape of Belarus. The unfortunate pair ultimately gets captured by the Germans. Schnittke’s score periodically punctures through the film’s ambient silence with repeated moments of avant-garde modernist orchestral music reminiscent of Penderecki and Ligeti and repeatedly accompanies moments of physical and moral pain. These musical moments gradually increase in length and loudness and culminate in two grizzly scenes: Nazis interrogate one soldier, and later the other viscerally reacts to his own complicity in his compatriot’s execution. In The Ascent, Schnittke’s score is not polystylistic—it adheres to a single style throughout; an analysis of this film score, though, demonstrates that Schnittke’s film music wrestles with the significance of the past in the present. In the case of The

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Ascent, the musically inflected experience of empathy complicates the conventional narrative of Soviet triumph over fascism and opens the door to reading the film as presenting a parallel between the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.

Session 4: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Long Nineteenth CenturyAndreas Giger (Louisiana State University), chair

Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a Prototype for the Romantic German Tragedy

Navid Bargrizan, University of Florida

From Kierkegaard’s seminal interpretation of Don Giovanni in Either/Or to a range of philosophical, aesthetic, semiotic, and music analytical readings, Mozart’s opera has posited essential problems, particularly in explaining the opera’s climactic moment, where Don Giovanni refuses the Commandatore’s offer to repent, descending then to the underworld. In fact, not only in this scene but also throughout the whole opera, Don Giovanni chooses to be a free, seductive villain, establishing an absolute freedom of reason and morality. As I demonstrate, Mozart’s rendering of Don Giovanni’s moral defiance and unwavering defense of his actions illustrates Friedrich Schiller’s concept of freedom, which substantiates his theory of tragedy and is fundamental to the formation of the nineteenth-century drama. Most pertinent is Schiller’s concept of “absolute freedom” where in Isaiah Berlin’s words, “If man is to be free he must be free not merely to do his duty, but he must be free to choose between either following nature or doing his duty.” Schiller’s absolute freedom elucidates not only Don Giovanni’s actions, but also Mozart’s musical choices in opera’s last scenes and the controversial issue of contingency of the final sextet, which presents the moral conclusion of the plot. On the basis of Schiller’s concept of absolute freedom, I argue that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a prototype of the concept of romantic German tragedy.

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To unveil the relevance of Schiller’s concept of freedom in the evolution of his theory of tragedy and to unfold the role of Schiller’s theory of tragedy in the formation of the romantic German drama, I expound upon how Schiller’s concept of freedom informs the plot of his major plays. Investigating the character of Don Giovanni and the quintessential scene where he confronts Commandatore’s ghost, I will then explain the significance of interpreting the opera according to Schiller’s concept of absolute freedom, concluding that, Mozart’s adoption of the evolving, contemporaneous theory of tragedy paved way for the nineteenth-century Romantic generation.

Guilty until Proven Innocent: Thomas Davis and the Struggles of Irish Art Music

Timothy Love, Louisiana State University

Ireland’s struggles with developing a vibrant art music culture are well documented. With little governmental support and even less public interest, art music in Ireland has lagged far behind the attention Irish literature and traditional music have garnered. Musicologist Harry White, in his monograph Keeper’s Recital, lamented the stark divide between traditional and art music cultures in twentieth-century Ireland and the lack of an “Irish Bartók” to reconcile the two. Irish composer Raymond Deane described the plight of twentieth-century Irish composers, toiling away with no recognition or support, as “the honour of non-existence.”

Searching for a culprit for this cultural apathy toward art music, scholars have often pointed their collective fingers at Thomas Davis. His popular campaign of cultural nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century, disseminated by the widely read journal The Nation and the successful songbook Spirit of the Nation, elevated the cultural profile of Irish traditional music and linked the repertoire with the cause of Irish nationalism. Davis’s style of song—plainspoken texts, martial spirit, and set to traditional tunes—became the standard for the remainder of the nineteenth century and heavily influenced public tastes. According to White and others, Davis’s

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campaign was the proverbial smoking gun that established the traditional repertoire as the preeminent Irish musical genre and soured the public on the possibilities of a viable Irish art musical culture.

But are the causes of Ireland’s musical struggles really so black and white? In addition to Davis’s cultural nationalism, Ireland’s complex history of colonialism and religious conflict needs to be examined. Furthermore, the pan-European interest in nineteenth-century folk song, signaled by the popularity of James MacPherson’s Poems of Ossian, as well as the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, ushered in widespread interest in a return to both the “natural” and “national” in music. By exploring the various historical, socio-political, and cultural factors in Ireland and across Europe that influenced the development of Ireland’s native art music, or lack thereof, I argue that the causes of Ireland’s musical struggles are more nuanced than previously considered. Davis does not emerge unscathed, but he is no longer the sole culprit.

SATURDAY, 20 February

Session 5: Music Creation and Music EducationMichael O’Connor (Palm Beach Atlantic University), chair

“Going to School and Winning the Olympics”: A Musicological Examination of Childsongs at a

Tallahassee Community CenterCarrie Danielson, Florida State University

Over the past decade, research into music and childhood has expanded, reflecting an acknowledgement of children as innovators, performers, and agents of their own musicultural navigation and identities. No longer considered a “musicalized other,” childsongs—a term Patricia Shehan Campbell uses to describe songs created and transmitted by children—have begun to make their way into musicological discourse. As the bourgeoning body of literature concerning childsongs continues to emerge, however, the need for musicological

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tools in which to study children, their compositions, and their improvisations becomes further warranted.

In this paper, I will draw upon musical compositions and improvisations collected from children involved in a music-play program at a community center in Tallahassee, Florida in order to discuss the various means in which children musically negotiate and evoke childhood in its dependent, independent, and interdependent forms. Specifically, I will argue that the compositional and musicking processes with which children engage reflect the ontological ambiguity of childhood, and by extension, the music they make. Such analysis does not diminish the qualities of childsongs and child musicking, but rather broadens the understanding of how music is conceived.

Two songs in particular: “Going to School and Winning the Olympics,” and “Little Rosie,” demonstrate the multifaceted nature of childhood and child musicking, each providing commentary about children’s social lives through sonic storytelling and musical play. Through hermeneutical analysis of these songs in conjunction with interviews and fieldwork with the children who created them, I intend to generate discussion about children as musicological subjects, childsongs as a genre, and how child-informed scholarship can further contribute to the goals and nuances of music criticism.

Sousa’s Band Arrangements of Orchestral Works and/as Public Education

Bryan Proksch, Lamar University

John Philip Sousa was not only an important composer and bandmaster, he was also an influential exponent for the popularization of European classical music in the United States. His seventy brass band arrangements/pastiches of classical masterworks by composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and others have remained unpublished and unperformed since his death. Created over the span of his entire career (1878–1924), they were a crucial to his promotion of the “masters” on his tours and were

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influential in bringing this repertoire to the larger public at a time when relatively few Americans outside of major metropolitan areas had access to classical music in the concert hall. By the same token the arrangements also forwarded his agenda to increase the visibility of the brass band as a kind of twentieth-century successor to the orchestra.

This paper will address Sousa’s arrangements and their concert performances from two angles. On the one hand his repertoire choices provide insights into issues such as canon formation and popular taste in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. His numerous published essays, many of which address the public’s perception of classical music, will be examined to demonstrate his justifications for the practice and the extent to which he viewed his efforts as successful. On the other hand, the preservation of these arrangements at the University of Illinois’s Sousa Archive permits an assessment of the suitability of their revival for modern concert-band or wind-ensemble performance. Sousa’s original intent for these works—to increase public awareness of classical music while also promoting a more prestigious high-art perception of brass bands as “modern orchestras”—can be retooled today in such a way as to expose high school and college band students to a repertoire and performance style all too often reserved for a dwindling number of students participating in orchestral programs.

Session 6: Conclusions Michael Broyles (Florida State University), chair

Out of the Back Row: Ferdinand Hiller’s Views on Composing Applied to His String Quartets

Douglass Seaton, Florida State University

Schumann hailed Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885) as one of the “remarkable manifestations” of a new school that “may well prove characteristic of a special epoch in the history of art.” Hiller established himself as an admired virtuoso pianist in Paris in the 1830s, sharing good times and noteworthy

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performances with Chopin and Liszt. He directed the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra during Mendelssohn’s absence, then proceeded to the music directorship in Düsseldorf, which he handed off to Schumann. He settled in Cologne, founded the music conservatory there, wrote copiously on musical topics, and mentored younger musicians including Brahms, Bruch, and Humperdinck. Yet he has been largely blocked from the view of music history, as if he stood in the back row for the class picture.

Among Hiller’s prose works is a little-known but engaging essay on the question “How Does One Compose?” written near the end of his career. That document sheds considerable light on his understanding of composition and musical style. Reference to his observations about composing offers the opportunity to adopt an approach to style analysis developed directly from the composer’s perspective.

Hiller composed three string quartets, almost entirely unknown today. Parts reside in only a few libraries, and until now they have not been edited in score. These works treat the genre in ways that show Hiller, as Schumann suggested, with one hand striving to undo the chains of the past and with the other pointing to the future. Texturally, they include fugues, examples of the concertante style popular in Paris, fully symphonic scoring in the Germanic manner, and some less usual scorings such as doubled duets. Notable forms range from a non-recapitulating sonata deformation to an attempt to create a musical realization of the Persian poetic form of the ghazal. Contextually, Hiller’s quartets—opp. 12 and 13 self-consciously following Mendelssohn’s with the same opus numbers, and op. 105 emerging simultaneously with Brahms’s op. 51—enhance our understanding of two phases of nineteenth-century music history.

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Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics and the Concept of Two-Dimensional Music DongJin Shin, University of Florida

When Stravinsky composed the Three Japanese Lyrics (1912-13), he justified his poetic choices as the best representation of what he called “two-dimensional music.” In fact, this concept was so important that he referred to it as late as 1959. While some scholars have related this music to the notions of Japonisme and exoticism; or ascribed the special text setting to Japanese linguistic traits—and analytical studies tend to focus on the use of octatonic collections and pitch-class sets—the composer’s idea of the two-dimensional music has been widely overlooked. As I argue in this paper, this concept is key for understanding not only Stravinsky’s music, but also his aesthetics.

Some of the most well-known features in Stravinsky’s music comprise his block and layered structures, which superimposes distinct musical materials vertically and horizontally together. These musical traits are similar, on a deeper level, to the many dimensions of cubist paintings. As evidence for my argument, I approach the work historically and analytically and compare it with Stravinsky’s Two Balmont Poems (1911) as examples of cubist music. Further, I demonstrate that the two-dimensional characteristics present in layers in the Three Japanese Lyrics are reflected in the pitch-class choices. This concept will be seminal in our understanding of structure and aesthetics of Stravinsky’s music at a critical moment in history, just around the time of the composition of the Rite of Spring (1911-1913).

John Adams and the Avant-Garde, 1971–72Michael Palmese, Louisiana State University

Prior to 1977, the year of his earliest mature works, John Adams struggled to find his compositional voice. Experimental and avant-garde music, especially that of John Cage, served as an important influence on the young Adams

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during this under-researched, youthful phase of his career. Drawing on formerly unexamined sources from Yale’s Oral History of American Music and archival radio broadcasts from KPFA (Berkeley, California), this paper sheds new light on Adams’s juvenilia by focusing on two works he composed between 1971 and 1972. Entitled Heavy Metal and Ktaadn, they demonstrate Adams’s struggle to engage with both Cage and the larger postwar avant-garde.

Heavy Metal, completed in 1971 and considered lost by the composer, is a tape piece inspired by contemporaneous electronic music of Cage and Stockhausen as well as the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. A single recording of the work does in fact exist as part of a larger April 1973 interview conducted by Charles Amirkhanian on KPFA. Heavy Metal is a setting of two different texts by Burroughs, one manipulated through Burroughs’s cut-up technique and one not. Resembling a chance-inspired collage, this piece suggests Adams’s exposure to the Cagean concepts of multiplicity and interpenetration.

Written and premiered in 1972 on a commission from the San Francisco Conservatory, Ktaadn demonstrates an alternative path Adams took towards reconciling Cage’s procedures with his own creative sensibilities. Most striking is the possibility that Adams modeled Ktaadn, at least in part, on a specific Cage work. With musical selections and performance instructions transcribed from the manuscript score held at the Julliard Music Library, I suggest that there are strong correspondences between Ktaadn and Cage’s Song Books.

In examining these two works, my paper provides a foundation for further study of this experimental phase of Adams’s career. Additionally, this paper offers insights into what exactly Adams found untenable about the avant-garde position and his gradual abandonment of it.

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